A study led by a McMaster medical student has found that Canadian health-care leadership teams have achieved gender parity, but still lack racial diversity.

Researchers considered more than 3,000 leaders from 135 health-care institutions and health ministries nationwide and found that about half were women. Of the 78 government health ministry leaders surveyed as part of the study, 47.4 per cent were female.

“We thought that women would be underrepresented in health-care leadership roles, particularly at the highest level of CEO and deputy ministers, but we discovered that there is actually gender parity,” says first author Anjali Sergeant, who in her third year of medicine at the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine.

“As a young professional, I feel hopeful to see that there are an equal number of women in executive leadership roles.”

Sergeant and her colleagues also found that health-care leadership teams remain overwhelmingly white, even as they serve increasingly diverse communities across Canada.

Researchers calculated the representation gap between racialized executives and the racialized population as being 14.5 per cent in British Columbia, 27.5 per cent in Manitoba, 20.7 per cent in Ontario, 12.4 per cent in Quebec, 7.6 per cent in New Brunswick, 7.3 per cent in Prince Edward Island and 11.6 per cent in Newfoundland and Labrador.

In Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, and PEI, each with a single health-care leadership team overseeing all hospital networks in the province, the number of non-white leaders was less than five, out of a total of 70.

The lack of racialized health-care leaders might stem from fewer racialized individuals in the hiring pool, a lack of access to networking opportunities, discriminatory hiring practices, or an institutional culture that views white male leaders as most effective, Sergeant says.

Possible solutions include better mentorship programs, rooting out discrimination from workplaces and ensuring that people of all backgrounds feel supported when applying for leadership roles, she says.

“We need to make our environments more inclusive and supportive of all people starting at the early education level, and carrying it forward through to higher levels of training,” Sergeant says.

“This is significant, because we know that individuals who are racialized experience worse health outcomes and might experience discrimination within our health-care systems.”

One way to improve outcomes for marginalized individuals is to have a leadership team that can relate to their lived experience and can advocate for them, she notes.

More research is needed to better understand the lack of diversity at the highest levels of health care, Sergeant says.

She and her colleagues conducted their investigation on gender and racial diversity in health-care leadership from April to July of 2021.

Click here to learn more about Sergeant’s findings in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.